Night bomber

A number of modern aircraft types are designed primarily for nighttime bombing, but air forces no longer refer to them as night bombers.

More common terms today include interdictor and strike fighter, and such aircraft tend to have all-weather, day-or-night capabilities.

Searchlights scanning the sky could illuminate aircraft by chance and might track them long enough for anti-aircraft artillery to fire a few shots.

The success rate of such defences were so low that it was widely believed that "The bomber will always get through", in the words of British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.

Here we were flying 500 or 600 miles over enemy territory, trying to locate a target in total blackout, often with cloud below us and a lot of industrial haze.

The most devastating air raid in the war was the firebombing of Tokyo on the night of March 9–10, 1945, which destroyed 16 square miles, killed 100,000 Japanese, and made a million people homeless.